Hotlines field thousands of calls about voting impediments

Hotlines run by a national voter protection coalition have received more than 18,000 calls from confused, upset, discouraged, or otherwise unhappy Americans facing difficulty voting in today’s midterm elections.

Complaints including long lines, malfunctioning voting machines, language barriers and confusion over voter identification laws. Florida, Georgia and Texas have generated the largest number of callers, according to the nonpartisan coalition Election Protection.

Most callers reaching out to the hotline are either trying to confirm their voting status or the location of their polling place, said Barbara Arnwine, executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

But officials said there were some more serious claims, including police officers standing near polls in Ferguson, Missouri, poll workers in Texas deciding if someone speaks English well enough to vote without assistance and “calibration issues” with voting machines in states including Virginia and Texas.

“We make democracy way too hard in this country,” Arnwine said.

Wade Henderson, president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said this midterm election is shaping up to be the most unfair, confusing and discriminatory election in the last 50 years.

The number of callers increased by 30 percent over 2010 figures, but that could be due to an increased push to educate voters about the hotlines.

Election Protection said the various issues voters were facing at the polls point to a large-scale, systemic problem in the United States, rather than isolated incidents:

In Georgia, the coalition said 40,000 people who registered to vote were missing from the state’s voter list, and hundreds more were not assigned a polling place. The Secretary of State’s website — where people check their voter registration status — was also down most of the morning.

In Texas, the new voter identification law, which requires a form of photo ID be presented at the polling location, caused confusion among voters as to what they could use. The coalition said that 1/4 of the calls from Texas were related to the voter ID law.

In Florida, the problems that have plagued the state since the infamous situation in 2000 have not been resolved, the coalition said. Calls about long lines and too few ballots were the main topics voters were worried about.

The Election Protection coalition also warned that aging voting machines and antiquated voter registration systems could damage the voting infrastructure in the United States going forward.

Janaye Ingram, executive director of the National Action Network, said the data collected by calls today give Congress and other organizations a better sense of the issues faced by voters and where the country needs to improve.